THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 531 



information as to species and stocks of mammals and birds and fishes, 

 for insect mates to symbiotic plants and insect enemies to noxious 

 organisms, and even for germs and cultures affecting the course of 

 organic progress. Meantime the Bureau of Animal Industry is not 

 only acquiring and diffusing definite knowledge concerning stocks and 

 breeding and feeding, but is importing and acclimating and crossing 

 the animals with the view of supplying each section with forms adapted 

 to its particular conditions and requirements. Thereby the domesti- 

 cated animals are modified and adjusted to a complex industrial mech- 

 anism, each yielding flesh or milk or leather or textile or eggs or feathers 

 or labor after its kind in connection with the human purpose; and if 

 the natural powers are feeble or aimless, they are so redirected and 

 intensified as to increase the efficiency of the organisms in promoting 

 the welfare of men and nations. 



Broadly, the functions of the other Federal Departments pertain 

 chiefly to relations among men, those of the Department of Agriculture 

 chiefly to the relations between men and nature. Its primary purpose, 

 both logical and legal, is to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning 

 those fundamentals of human power and prosperity residing in the soil 

 and its products. In carrying out this purpose, it necessarily assim- 

 ilates and promotes that consciously organized and definite knowledge 

 pertaining to nature which constitutes both the subject-matter and the 

 object-matter of science; and with its growth it has been called on to 

 make all manner of applications, from the extirpation of insect pests 

 to the protection of the purity of foods and medicines for men and the 

 making of roads for moving the produce of the soil. Its final function, 

 which has arisen and taken form with its growth, is the redirection of 

 natural processes and powers along lines which are not only prevised, 

 but clearly preconceived in relation to ends — and hence are practical. 

 In performing this function, it deals constantly with the four primal 

 elements in their relation to man ; beginning with the earth, it progres- 

 sively increases the efficiency of soils and plants and animals; and 

 through this element it utilizes and so gains partial control over the air, 

 the water and the power of the sun — and the measure of the. efficiency 

 is human power and prosperity. 



Thus far the relations chiefly considered in the Department of 

 Agriculture have been those of nature, and of men to nature, adapted 

 to increasing the efficiency of nature for human ends; there has been 

 little effort to apply the natural powers to men or to increase their 

 efficiency except by arming them with better knowledge. The time for 

 directly increasing human efficiency by intensifying human power has 

 hardly come; yet it may easily be descried as the next stage in the de- 

 velopment of relations between men and nature. 



